Windrush boxer wins the final round
Photo: © Steve Gregson
Daniel Nelson
On The Ropes ”tells a story that is fundamentally important to all British people in understanding what it means to be British, particularly in the context of the ongoing debate about immigration”.
Co-author Dougie Blaxland, arms resting on the boxing ring ropes that provide the setting for the play’s first half, is right. What is Britishness worth, the play asks, if the government suddenly changes the rules and bars a man from re-entering the country though he has lived here since the age of six, has siblings living here, is a British boxing star, and has married and has children in the UK?
The play tells that man’s story: Vernon Vanriel, a now frail 67-year-old Windrush casualty and victor.
It follows his rise as a brash, lippy young boxer almost to the top of the lightweight rankings, his comments about exploitative white managers — and his subsequent vertiginous fall via drugs, mental illness, bad decisions and, inevitably, racist police.
It gets worse after a phone call leads him to fly to Jamaica to shack up with an old flame and a previously unknown young son. That, too, turns sour. So he decides to return to UK.
But his plan is stymied by his most ruthless opponent: the Home Office.
Unable to board a flight out of Jamaica, he spirals down down down, into years of complete poverty, homelessness, despair, and illness.
Even the efforts of his London family to gather the requisite paperwork are met by implacable officialdom, culminating in the Home Office’s catch-22 masterstroke: you can appeal the decision not to provide a British passport, but to do so you must be in Britain - which is impossible without a passport to get there.
Despite the odds, and thanks mainly to Amelia Gentleman’s Windrush reports in The Guardian, Vanriel finally wins that particular round in his lifetime struggle, only to be blocked by a second catch-22 blow: denial of citizenship on the grounds that he had failed to complete five continuous years of residency up to the day of the applications — years in which was wrongly barred from the country.
Fortunately for the punch-drunk audience his struggle continued, culminating in a famous high court victory.
Despite the triumph, it’s a painful story, told with honesty: Vanriel is a black, flawed, bipolar, cocaine-consuming, showy, working class character, not the usual sort of man with which still predominantly white middle-class theatregoers comfortably identify.
The acting and the reggae, rock, pop and soul songs with which the play is peppered have enough energy to power the Park Theatre for a year, but the first section covering a succession of fights is overstretched. It’s a relief when the demons burst through the triumphalism and the human drama begins.
What a story, though, and one that needs to be told.
* On The Ropes, £15-£44.50, is at the Park Theatre, Clifton Terrace, Finsbury Park, London N4 3JP, until 4 February. Info: 7870 6876/ https://parktheatre.co.uk/whats-on